Yearly Archives: 2010

I’m in Houston, finish­ing up a piece for my friend Maggie, who will play it in Pasadena, Cali­for­nia in February. Pasadena is the ances­tral home of one of my pianos.

Somehow I can’t bring myself to set entire poems. The Maggie piece is just a couple of lines by Hart Crane (with repe­ti­tion, of course). One of the reasons most “art song” (for want of a better term) is unsat­is­fy­ing to me is the dutiful tele­ol­ogy of it— here’s the poem, set it to music, and when you get to the end, you’re done. Poetic form is almost always differ­ent from musical form, and letting one dictate the other seems to me like a huge cop-out.

This is the first time I’ve incor­po­rated live elec­tron­ics into a piece— in this case, a looping pedal. Maggie sings the piece over her own live, looped bass accom­pa­ni­ment. Looping Pedal Music is another one of those Niches of Modern Compo­si­tion that almost always feels lacking in some way. A pretty musical loop is another crutch, like a poem, that can provide an easy form, but the music ends up a strange combi­na­tion of direc­tion­less and predictable. (The huge excep­tion to this is of course Ingram Marshall’s music, which incor­po­rates live elec­tronic elements in a beau­ti­fully unself­con­scious and seamless way). Using a loop as the basis of a piece can be compared to using a passacaglia, or chaccone, or any other type of repeat­ing ground, except that once you’ve set it running, it’s very diffi­cult (if not impos­si­ble) to alter it. This rules out most of the inter­est­ing things you can do with such a tech­nique— trans­for­ma­tions, distor­tions, and other devi­a­tions.

I think I’ve justi­fied the use of loops to myself in this partic­u­lar piece, but in the process, made things a lot harder on Maggie; she’ll have to set and reset multiple loops on top of each other several times through­out the piece, while singing and playing the bass, that most unwieldy of instru­ments. It’s going to involve some fancy footwork, that’s for sure.

My brother Guthrie has been live-tweeting the current blizzard, which I think makes him the first person in history to attempt such a feat of mete­o­ro­log­i­cal hilarity. Though maybe they do it all the time in New Hamp­shire, I just don’t know. What with all the stories of pond-skating, drift-shov­el­ing, and snow-homuncu­lus-making crowding all of my news sources (facebook, twitter, and nytimes.com) I’m starting to feel rather left out. We’ve been attempt­ing our own versions of winter­time activ­i­ties here: tried out the skating rink at Discov­ery Green, a poor showing; our attempt to build a ginger­bread house turned out better, if a bit rough around the edges.

At least winter makes for much better biking here! I’m happily tooling around on a borrowed Cannon­dale, thankful that I need not invest in studded snow tires. Those things are expen­sive! Sadly, drivers in Houston are quite unac­cus­tomed to encoun­ters with law-abiding cyclists; even on streets with bike lanes and “share the road” signs, I hear “get off the road!” (and other choice epithets) much more often than on the suppos­edly-rough streets of NYC.

I’m also happy because I think I may have just found my own Niche of Modern Compo­si­tion: wheel-building! I may not know how to tune my own piano, but perhaps I’ll soon learn how to achieve melo­di­ous spoke tension.

Schumann’s 200th birthday is come and gone, and here are our esteemed critics recom­mend­ing the same old stuff. And admit­ting that they have “mixed feelings” (for a while I was friends with Clara Schumann on Facebook, who I believe was in an “It’s compli­cated” rela­tion­ship with Robert). Will Schumann forever be the “middle child” of German Roman­tics? Do we have to wait another century before people learn to love the piano trios, the Märch­en­erzäh­lun­gen, and the Gesänge der Frühe? I kind of feel as if this isn’t my job— to tell people to check out Robert Schumann, of all people— but here are some of my favorite record­ings:

Actually forget the record­ings. Just buy this and sit yourself down at the piano (or find a friend to do it) and you’ll be happy.

My mother, who is a non-musician but an avid listener, made an inter­est­ing comment to me after hearing us play Clamber Music on Saturday, some­thing along the lines of “I like the parts where there are so many rhythms going on at once that you can’t hear which one is the actual rhythm”. I thought this was partic­u­larly astute because those are the parts I like best, too.

If music is ulti­mately about repe­ti­tion or the lack thereof, then it’s impor­tant to keep in mind that listen­ers’ percep­tion of tempo and rhythm is relative. They have to be able to perceive some­thing in the first place in order for it to be distorted. This exactly why the first movement of Adés’s Concerto Conciso is such visceral fun to listen to, despite its surface complex­ity:

The same thing is going on in this passage from Schumann’s Fantasia in C, in the middle of the first movement, only the other way around: the music starts out shifted forward by an eighth note, and keeps shifting back and forth every couple of seconds, giving the whole passage a stum­bling forward momentum, like someone excit­edly trying to say too many words at once:

At the root of the issue is that you can write music that’s as clever (or as dumb) as you want, but people like to be able to hear at least some of what’s going on. In art, it doesn’t matter how smart you are if you lack the capacity to express yourself clearly. At least that’s what my mother always told me.

Since I’m done cramming my own art down people’s throats (at least for the next few weeks) I thought I’d use the oppor­tu­nity to recom­mend some new work by two friends, both perfect for this prema­turely crepus­cu­lar Sunday after­noon.

Jon Ehren­berg is a visual artist who I got to know recently. Though a painter by training, he’s made some lovely live-animated short films which are being shown for the next month or so at Nicelle Beauch­ene Gallery. You can see some excerpts from his work at his website, though I recom­mend going to see them in person because, full disclo­sure, I wrote new music for two of them: Seed and Moth. Oh well, so much for the break from self-promo­tion.

I wasn’t able to attend this year’s New Music New Haven orches­tra concert (in fact, it’s the first one I’ve missed since my freshman year at Yale!) but I strongly suggest you take a listen to Adrian Knight’s lovely and expan­sive Comblé. It’s one of those gener­ously-propor­tioned pieces that would defi­nitely be too long if not for the fact that it’s incred­i­bly detailed and well-balanced. It’s also just refresh­ing to hear a student orches­tra work that’s not your standard 8-minute crowd-pleaser.

Through a combi­na­tion of clever sched­ul­ing and happen­stance, I’ve got the day off before my upcoming hat trick. This is great because it allows me to take care of all those little things that pop up before a concert— last-minute comps, ironing, finger­nail clipping, face shaving (some­thing I only have to do every three or four days), fake yoga (or fauxga), and where am I going to take my family to eat after­wards?

I also like a day off’s effect on my playing— after becoming so entrenched in a piece, it suddenly sounds fresher, more alive, after a little break. In this case, I have the luxury of being able to practice on the piano I’ll be perform­ing on. It always helps to have a few days to get accli­mated. It’s a Bösendor­fer, a seven-footer like mine, though with quite a differ­ent person­al­ity— extremely respon­sive, built for the Autobahn, whereas mine is much more forgiv­ing, like a buxom Bavarian lass. It makes me nervous to think of the damage I could incur.

The other thing making me nervous is that somehow I got myself into this situ­a­tion where I’m expected to perform Schumann’s Kreis­le­ri­ana tomorrow! It feels very differ­ent from when I was a teenager, and would blithely tackle any piano reper­toire, the longer and more demand­ing the better. Now, I’m more acutely aware of my lack of qual­i­fi­ca­tions. Playing a piece that’s so familiar to the audience is like walking a tightrope; there’s a tension in the air, as if everyone’s waiting for you to fall. I’ll play your world première any day. Here’s a little conver­sa­tion I had with Metrop­o­lis Ensemble’s Nate Bach­hu­ber (note the double H) about the thinking behind tomorrow’s concert and various other trivia.

Speaking of which, I’ve been assem­bling press kits lately, at the behest of and with much help from my friend Emily. If you get one of these in the mail, it means: please hire me! I’ll play a concert, compose some music, do your dishes, tune up your bike, etc.

The NY Phil­har­monic, in their newfound quest to be “hip and with it”, contin­ues to hand out comps to anything resem­bling a blogger, so here I am, blogging. Chris and I had high hopes for last night’s CONTACT! show at Sympho­ny­Space; we were partic­u­larly excited to hear Gerard Grisey’s Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil, a huge song cycle written just before his death in 1998. Grisey’s music isn’t played very often here in New York, I assume because of the daunting demands it places on musi­cians, audi­ences, and stage managers alike; his language incor­po­rates micro­tones (grada­tions of pitch outside the 12-note chro­matic scale) as well as about half an acre of differ­ently-sized gongs.

I’ll take a para­graph now to address the NY Phil’s PR depart­ment directly: “live-tweeting”Quatre chants pour franchir le seuil is bathetic on the level of “photo-blogging” your meal at Alinea; it speaks only of the tweeter himself. Take a step back and think, now; what does one hope to achieve by contribut­ing 160 tren­chant char­ac­ters to the #nyphilcon­tact bucket? Nothing beyond “concert good” or “concert bad” means much to someone who wasn’t also present, expe­ri­enc­ing the same sounds and images. A composer I vaguely recog­nized was sitting alone across the aisle from me, face perpet­u­ally bathed in his iPhone’s glow; was his twitter feed a stand-in for an absent compan­ion? Here’s the other thing. Arts insti­tu­tions are all about intro­duc­ing tech­no­log­i­cal gimmicks in the name of “outreach” and “embrac­ing new audi­ences”, but what audience do we see contribut­ing to the afore­men­tioned bucket? Composers, PR people, hardcore new-music bloggers, the occa­sional “real critic”, i.e. the audience who would come to the concert anyway, and pay for it happily, too.

But I’m being mean and negative, and the Grisey was truly, spec­tac­u­larly good. Chris and I agreed that the piece conforms to our rules for How to Not Be Boring. Namely:

use sharply defined, instantly recog­niz­able musical mate­ri­als;

struc­ture your mate­ri­als in a way that is audible;

don’t use too much, or extra­ne­ous material.

If you, too want to write a 50-minute micro­tonal rumi­na­tion on the tran­sience of life, civi­liza­tion, and the human race, then you should probably follow these rules. Inci­den­tally, Not Being Boring should be the absolute bare minimum, and beside its value as virtu­osic spec­ta­cle, I found Quatre chants quite moving; La Mort de la Civil­i­sa­tion was partic­u­larly beau­ti­ful, a glacial, methodic reading of partially destroyed inscrip­tions on Egyptian sarcophagi.

Of course, it also helped that Alan Gilbert, the small group of NY Phil musi­cians, and most of all, Barbara Hannigan (a soprano/total fox) gave a commit­ted and riveting perfor­mance. It takes the charisma of a great stage actor to hold an audience’s atten­tion for 50 minutes, espe­cially while remain­ing still and silent during, say, a five-minute drum inter­lude; anyone who saw Le Grand Macabre last spring (or, as I did, watched the videos on YouTube) knew that Hannigan would be up to the task:

Seems likely she’ll become a regular at Gilbert’s Phil­har­monic, and I couldn’t be more pleased. Thanks for the beers, Phil, and until next time.

Happy to have been Gabe’s last-minute +1 for yesterday’s Sufjan Stevens show at the Beacon. I’ve been listen­ing to The Age of Adz for the past several weeks and have grown pretty accus­tomed to its strange­ness— a kind of campy, DIY electro-futurism seem­ingly calcu­lated to flummox fans of the precious, ideal­ized-campfire-singa­long Sufjan. During the first half of the perfor­mance, which was mostly new material, the audience seemed almost cowed; it wasn’t until after the 25-minute epic Impos­si­ble Soul and the band played the inevitable Chicago that we heard girls scream­ing “Sufjan, you changed my life!”

When I listen to the record, Impos­si­ble Soul seems like about five separate songs roughly stitched together, but live, it was unac­count­ably satis­fy­ing. It’s the same kind of sense one has trying to under­stand the last movement of Mahler’s 2nd symphony; if you’re not almost bodily involved in the music, it can sound episodic, or even nonsen­si­cal (but then, Mahler doesn’t have mid-movement dance parties, or release balloons from the ceiling). It makes me so, so happy to see a “pop” composer exper­i­ment­ing with large-scale forms, and even happier to hear them work so well. I can’t exactly even say why it works, but it has some­thing to do with its place on the album, and in the show, and the thinning and thick­en­ing of textures, and the pacing of events. I suppose those qual­i­ties decide why most music succeeds or fails.

After which the “encore” section of the show felt like a completely differ­ent set— mostly consist­ing of material from Illinois, with only light contri­bu­tions from the band (by the way, yeah! that was Alex Sopp up there!). Chris Thile’s quip about Arcade Fire— “ten people doing the work of four”— felt apropos here. Sufjan ended the night with the ultimate downer, John Wayne Gacy, Jr., almost whis­pered— you could feel the entire theater collec­tively holding its breath.

Speaking of songs about serial killers, I’m playing piano in Matt Marks’sThe Adven­tures of Albert Fish on what looks to be a wholly crazy show at Gala­pa­gos on December 5th.

I made myself a new website and this is it. Take some looks around. I moved the entire thing over to Word­Press, and it’s new from the very humblest line of code on up. The theme (which is Word­Press-speak for the look and orga­ni­za­tion of the site) is custom, HTML5-ready, iOS compat­i­ble (not a lick of flash!), it’s called “Irksome­cush­ion” in homage to my very first website, and no, you can’t use it. Moving to Word­Press gives me nice things like RSS feeds and perma­links, as well as a content-manage­ment system that is quite smartly designed. I know, welcome to 2004!

Not every­thing is in place yet, in partic­u­lar the Visuals section, because I haven’t thought of a satis­fac­tory way to organize and display a gallery of pictures. (If anyone has any sugges­tions for a clean, customiz­able gallery frame­work, please leave a reply). That reminds me, comments! I’ve enabled them to start, even though I have mixed feelings about sites with comments. Out of the billions of comment threads on the internet, there are probably about 12 that have ever been inter­est­ing. Also I’ve heard that comment spam is a thing these days; we’ll see if WordPress’s filters are up to the task. Not only can you reply to posts on this blog, but you can comment on indi­vid­ual pieces in the Works section, and concerts in the Piano section, which I may live to regret. Be nice, every­body!

Also, if you’re reading this, it means you’re an unwit­ting beta-tester! That’s what the little “beta” up top means—it’s an easy way for me to launch a new website that still might have lots of errors in it, and have them not be my fault. But truly, if you come across anything on this new site that you think is a mistake or bug, please get in touch; I would be most grateful. I’m also grateful to many pseu­do­nyméd people over at the Word­Press commu­nity for answer­ing my ques­tions and gener­ally making life easier, and to Panic (shock­ingly good Mac software™) for making the wonder­ful Coda and Transmit.

Last night was the Brad Mehldau Expe­ri­ence at Zankel Hall, which I’m happy to see got a rather good review in the Times. The concert was pretty much a straight run-through of his double album (more on this in a bit) Highway Rider, for a quintet of soloists and chamber orches­tra. Matt Chamberlain’s drumming was partic­u­larly reve­la­tory to me; I’m not a jazz connois­seur by any means, but it seemed to me that he was having an espe­cially wonder­ful time on stage, foiling and delight­ing with every turn of phrase. Cham­ber­lain doesn’t move the way I’ve seen other good drummers move; he doesn’t look loose or relaxed at all, rather more like a spring-loaded puppet with fewer joints than most humans. Whereas another drummer would flick his wrist, Cham­ber­lain moves his entire arm, like a martial artist; it doesn’t look partic­u­larly comfort­able to me, but I was enthralled by the visual effect of it, and by the incred­i­bly complex layers of rhythm and timbre it produced.

Brad had let his grey hair grow out a bit, and also gotten thinner and put on a small velvet suit, which gave him a crazy-but-dapper profes­so­r­ial quality, a profes­sor who was also possibly a charis­matic and success­ful cult leader. His playing was char­ac­ter­is­ti­cally inven­tive and virtu­osic, includ­ing what sounded like an impro­vised fugue (!) some­where in the last few move­ments (I don’t think it’s on the CD). I’m not even sure I remember how to write a fugue, much less impro­vise a completely natural and bad-ass sounding one, in a jazz piece. As good as it was, Highway Rider tested the limits of my concert-sitting abil­i­ties; six years of attend­ing New Music New Haven has over-sensi­tized me to long concerts, and around the two hour mark I start to panic and wonder if my bike is still doing OK. Speaking of which, Carnegie Hall really needs some bike parking. It doesn’t have to be an eyesore; it could actually be an oppor­tu­nity to class things up. Hire a black­smith to do some wrought-iron grille work! Or hire David Byrne. Or teach David Byrne how to smith.

I opened the refrig­er­a­tor today and found myself face to face with a large cauli­flower, and nothing else. I’d picked it up at the Ft. Greene farmers’ market last weekend (which I like because it doesn’t over­whelm me). The main chal­lenge with turning a cauli­flower into an entire meal is that, frankly, it’s cauli­flower. But this is a happy story, with a deli­cious ending, good enough in fact to post it up here.

Fig. 1: cooling on my balcony.

Roasted cauliflower

Take a head of cauli­flower and hack it into medium bits. Toss it up with a fair bit of chopped garlic, smoked paprika, salt, olive oil, and (this is key) Moroccan preserved lemon. Spread it out on a baking sheet and roast at 425º for half an hour or so. While that’s happen­ing, toast up some pecans in a skillet with a bit of chili powder. Once the cauli­flower has browned parts (see fig. 1) take it out of the oven and put the pecans on top. Let the whole mess cool— it seems to get better and sweeter at room temper­a­ture.